The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) is the highest-ranked recommendation for a large space mission in the NRC 2010 decadal survey, New Worlds, New Horizons (NWNH) in Astronomy and Astrophysics. The WFIRST coronagraph ...
Astronomy
Nov 15, 2016
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Supermassive black holes, with their immense gravitational pull, are notoriously good at clearing out their immediate surroundings by eating nearby objects. When a star passes within a certain distance of a black hole, the ...
Astronomy
Sep 15, 2016
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Astronomers studying distant galaxies powered by monster black holes have uncovered an unexpected link between two very different wavelengths of the light they emit, the mid-infrared and gamma rays. The discovery, which was ...
Astronomy
Aug 24, 2016
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116
Alone on the cosmic road, far from any known celestial object, a young, independent star is going through a tremendous growth spurt.
Astronomy
Jul 27, 2016
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Two volunteer participants in an international citizen science project have had a rare galaxy cluster that they found named after them.
Astronomy
Jun 13, 2016
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417
In 2011, astronomers announced that our galaxy is likely teeming with free-floating planets. In fact, these lonely worlds, which sit quietly in the darkness of space without any companion planets or even a host sun, might ...
Astronomy
Apr 20, 2016
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A team of astronomers from Carnegie and the University of Western Ontario has discovered one of the youngest and brightest free-floating, planet-like objects within relatively close proximity to the Sun. The paper reporting ...
Astronomy
Apr 6, 2016
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333
NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission has released its second year of survey data. The spacecraft has now characterized a total of 439 NEOs since the mission was re-started in December 2013. ...
Space Exploration
Apr 6, 2016
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27
Using a set of coadded images taken by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany and the University of Toronto in Canada, have provided new insights ...
The most luminous galaxy in the Universe - a so-called obscured quasar 12.4 billion light-years away - is so violently turbulent that it may eventually jettison its entire supply of star-forming gas, according to new observations ...
Astronomy
Jan 15, 2016
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